Introduction to Harold Garfinkel's Ethnomethodological "Misreading" of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field

Abstract

This article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993. Garfinkel extensively discusses the relevance of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenological treatment of Gestalt theory for ethnomethodology. Garfinkel uses the term “misreading” to signal a respecification of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological investigations, and particularly his conceptions of contextures, functional significations, and phenomenal fields, so that they become compatible with detailed observations and descriptions of social actions and interactions performed in situ. Garfinkel begins with Gurwitsch’s demonstrations with line drawings and other abstract examples, and suggests how they can be used to suggest original procedures for investigating the vicissitudes of embodied practical actions in the lifeworld. This introduction to the lecture aims to provide some background on the scope of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological critique and elaboration of Gestalt theory and Garfinkel’s “misreading” of it in terms of his own conceptions of indexicality and accountability, and ethnomethodological investigations of the production of social order.

Transposing Gestalt Phenomena from Visual Fields to Practical and Interactional Work: Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ Social Praxeology

“…Despite his long-term interest in the writings of key phenomenologists, in lectures he delivered in the decades following the publication of Studies, Garfinkel frequently advised his students to misread Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Heidegger [Eisenmann & Lynch 2021]. What exactly he meant by such "misreading" is potentially confusing.…”

“…He then paused, while making an argument, before inscribing the second dot, pointing to the blackboard, and then waiting for a response from the audience. With this deliberative enactment, Garfinkel not only referred to, or represented, a phenomenal field; he also inscribed and enacted a field of social practices and praxeological descriptions [Eisenmann & Lynch 2021]. Garfinkel thereby embodied his "misreading" and "respecification" of Gurwitsch's demonstration.…”

Wittgensteinian Ethnomethodology (1): Gurwitsch, Garfinkel, and Wittgenstein and the Meaning of Praxeological Gestalts

“…I give them the EM name: "a figuration of details". [Garfinkel 2002, 177] Garfinkel's "misreading" [Lynch 2009, 107], [Eisenmann & Lynch 2021], [Garfinkel 2021[Garfinkel , 2002 of Aron Gurwitsch's phenomenological work on Gestalten speaks directly to his concerns with the relationship between the perennial dualisms that persist in social psychology and sociology; these are the dualisms of action-social fact, and agency-structure, which are in turn tokens of a more general type of dualism of particular and whole. 11 The question is, if we establish as our fundamental principle the objective reality of the whole (social facts, structure) as Durkheim demanded [2013, 15] and Garfinkel endorsed [Garfinkel 2002[Garfinkel , 1996 how are we to study this?…”

“The Temporal ‘Succession’ of Here and Now Situations”: Schütz and Garfinkel on Sequentiality in Interaction

“…Further inspirations include Merleau-Ponty's (1962;1968) investigations on the body and "intertwining" and Heidegger's (1996) notion of "equipment" and "availability" (Garfinkel et al, 1981). These authors were similarly inspiring to ethnomethodology and, more so than Schütz, to the 'studies of work and science' (Garfinkel, 2007;Wiley, 2019;Eisenmann & Lynch, 2021). Nevertheless, although Schütz is no longer a central reference, he did lay contributing groundwork by the specific way he extended phenomenological notions of temporality to the study of interaction, allowing 'situations' to come into view as a flux of mutually oriented and interweaving actions.…”